Bad marketers reorganize. Good ones diagnose

I worked with a client about a year ago. This week, I reached out to their CMO to ask how things were going.

Her answer, paraphrased: leads are critically low, the team isn't performing, social doesn't have a clear role, the customer journey map doesn't exist, and nobody owns the right stages of the funnel.

Her plan? Rebuild the team structure. Map every channel. Define who owns what. Hire a PR person who can run outreach. Diversify traffic so no single channel brings in more than 40–50% of leads.

I've heard this plan before. When pipeline dries up, the response is almost always the same: reorganize.

In today's newsletter:

• The wrong way to fix a leads problem
• The right questions to ask instead

Reorganizing your team won't solve the leads problem

You can hire new roles and assign channel ownership to each one. You can build a customer journey map with boxes and arrows.

It looks strategic. And it solves exactly nothing.

A leads problem almost never comes from unclear org structure.

It comes from not knowing your positioning, from producing content nobody asked for, for an audience you haven't fully defined. From trying to be present on five channels before you've understood why one of them works.

If you want to diversify into three new channels, but you still can't answer who buys from you, what makes them choose you over the next option, and what content has actually moved someone from curious to ready, adding channels won't fix anything. 

You just have more places to be invisible.

What a bad marketer asks when leads are down

• Which channels should we add?
• Who should own social?
• Do we need to rebuild the team structure?
• What's our customer journey map missing?

These are organizational questions. They assume everything is fine with the fuel.

What a good marketer asks when leads are down

• What has actually worked before, and why did it work?
• Who exactly are we selling to, and does our content speak to them?
• Are we saying something different from everyone else, or are we blending in?
• Is the market changing, or are we the ones standing still?

These are diagnostic questions. They go after the fuel, not the engine.

If you don't know what's working, adding channels won't help. 

How to be a good marketer

I keep telling clients the same thing, and I'll say it again here:

• Know your positioning. 
• Know your ICP. 
• Double down on what's already moving the needle. 
• Then, and only then, treat new channels as experiments with clear success criteria.

See you next week

I am reorganizing things at Zmist & Copy right now. But more on the automation and AI side of things. I can't keep myself away from my computer and Claude for long in the past couple of weeks…

Kateryna

P.S. If we aren't connected already, follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram. If you like this newsletter, please refer your friends.

P.P.S. Need help with quality content? Zmistify your content with Zmist & Copy.

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